company:skype

#DDoS : une unité d’espionnage britannique cible des Anonymous
▻http://www.generation-nt.com/ddos-gchq-anonymous-hacktiviste-lulzsec-actualite-1846932.html

D’après des documents fuités par Edward Snowden et analysés par NBC, les services de renseignement électronique britanniques ( Government Communications Headquarters ; #GCHQ ) ont usé d’attaques DDoS pour perturber les moyens de communication de membres d’Anonymous.

(...)

Baptisée Rolling Thunder et menée par une unité d’espionnage Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, une opération aurait réussi en l’espace d’un mois à réduire de 80 % le nombre d’hacktivistes se réunissant sur des chat rooms IRC utilisées par Anonymous.

(...)

Le JTRIG a par ailleurs utilisé Facebook, Twitter, Skype, de la messagerie instantanée ou l’email pour diffuser auprès d’hacktivistes un message selon lequel les attaques DDoS sont illégales. Manifestement, ce n’est pas illégal pour tout le monde...

The New Snowden Revelation Is Dangerous for Anonymous — And for All of Us
▻http://www.wired.com/opinion/2014/02/comes-around-goes-around-latest-snowden-revelation-isnt-just-dangerous-anonym

Whether you agree with the activities of Anonymous or not — which have included everything from supporting the Arab Spring protests to DDoSing copyright organizations to doxing child pornography site users — the salient point is that democratic governments now seem to be using their very tactics against them.

The key difference, however, is that while those involved in Anonymous can and have faced their day in court for those tactics, the British government has not. When Anonymous engages in lawbreaking, they are always taking a huge risk in doing so. But with unlimited resources and no oversight, organizations like the GCHQ (and theoretically the NSA) can do as they please. And it’s this power differential that makes all the difference.

(...)

(...) that means we’re inching into the same territory as the dictatorial regimes criticized by democratic governments for not respecting internet freedoms.

#Google Acquires Artificial Intelligence Startup #DeepMind For More Than $500M | TechCrunch
▻http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/26/google-deepmind

DeepMind was founded by neuroscientist Demis Hassabis, a former child prodigy in chess, Skype and Kazaa developer Jaan Tallin, and researcher Shane Legg.

This is the latest move by Google to fill out its roster of artificial intelligence experts (...) Ray Kurzweil, who was hired in 2012 as a director of engineering focused on machine learning and language processing.

Kurzweil has said that he wants to build a search engine so advanced that it could act like a “cybernetic friend.”

voir aussi ▻http://recode.net/2014/01/26/exclusive-google-to-buy-artificial-intelligence-startup-deepmind-for-400m

#intelligence_artificielle #text_mining

The NSA is trying to have it both ways on its domestic spying programs
▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/22/the-nsa-is-trying-to-have-it-both-ways-on-its-domestic-spying-progra

(...)

... now the Internet has made a hash of the tidy distinction between foreign and domestic surveillance. Today, citizens of France, Brazil and Nigeria routinely use Facebook, Gmail, and other American online services to communicate. Americans make calls with Skype. And much Internet traffic between two foreign countries often passes through the United States.

The NSA has reacted to this changing communications landscape by trying to claim the best of both worlds. The FISA Amendments Act, passed in 2008, gave the NSA the power to compel domestic telecommunications providers to cooperate with the NSA’s surveillance programs. Yet the NSA has resisted the transparency and judicial oversight that has traditionally accompanied domestic surveillance. They’ve argued that disclosing the existence of these programs would compromise their effectiveness. And they’ve argued that because the “targets” of surveillance are overseas, only limited judicial oversight by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, not individualized Fourth Amendment warrants, were required.

But the NSA programs revealed by Snowden, including PRISM and the phone records program, look more like domestic surveillance programs than foreign ones. Like conventional domestic wiretaps, they rely on compelling domestic firms to cooperate with surveillance. Like conventional wiretaps, they sweep up information about the communications of Americans on American soil. And like domestic wiretaps, information collected by the NSA is sometimes shared with domestic law enforcement agencies for prosecution of Americans.

If the NSA is going to run what amounts to a domestic surveillance program that collects the private information of Americans on American soil, it’s going to face pressure to subject that program to the same kind of oversight as other domestic surveillance program. That means disclosing the general characteristics of the program—but not the specific targets—to the public. And it means requiring individualized warrants, supported by probable cause, before the government can intercept the communications of Americans on American soil.

#NSA #surveillance

The NSA is Coming to Town : Hilarious Parody Music Video!
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/The_NSA_is_Coming_to_Town_Hilarious_Parody_Music_Video

Yes, NSA spying is real. Please take action to end it now: ▻http://bit.ly/nsaiscomingtotown The Lyrics: You better watch out, You better not Skype, You better log out, Yeah you better not type, The...

Syria’s ’bride of the revolution’ mourns freedom in #al_Qaeda's grip | Reuters
▻http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/05/us-syria-crisis-qaeda-raqqa-idUSBRE9B40XB20131205

“At the time we were all happy with the liberation, it was not important who was there. #Raqqa was for all Syrians and all those who helped liberate it,” said one of several residents and activists contacted by Reuters via Skype.

The euphoria did not last.

In the weeks that followed, prisons appeared in public buildings, electricity was cut off and shops were banned from selling tobacco, considered anti-Islamic by the ultra-puritan, masked Islamist fighters who began patrolling the city.

“They also closed the universities saying that because women are also taking lessons there it should be shut,” said a resident whose son is a media activist and is now wanted by the Islamists.

Following a pattern seen across northern Syria, the al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) slowly tightened its grip.

“When Raqqa was liberated we thought now that the regime is out, the era of freedom has begun. People started cleaning the streets. We thought we were living a dream,” said another resident who, like most Raqqa locals, declined to be named for their safety. “It was dream. They killed it.”

The fighters took over government buildings, turning them into headquarters and prisons. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said an Armenian church in Raqqa was converted into an office and another into an administrative building.

The jihadi fighters carried out public executions in a main square, instilling fear among residents and stifling any possibility of protest.

During the day, only a few shops are open, selling basic foodstuffs. By nightfall streets are emptied, residents say.

“Electricity is cut off from the whole city; only their buildings have power. The whole city lives in the dark and they have the light,” said an activist who fled weeks ago.

An activist from Raqqa, who has moved to the north-western province of Idlib, blamed the Western-backed Free Syrian Army rebel fighters for allowing the jihadis to take over.

“All the FSA cared for was stealing and accumulating money. From the first day of Raqqa’s liberation they left it to the Islamic State,” he said.

Residents say they know little about the fighters. They include Iraqis, Gulf Arabs and Libyans, they say, but keep their identity hidden behind masks and avoid conversation.

“At first these masked gunmen were nice to people, they helped the people here,” said a resident in his 40s.

But then problems emerged, particularly after ISIL began executions of people who had supported the revolt and even helped the rebels take over the city.

“They began assassinating the leaders of the (rebel) Free Syrian Army. They burnt churches, destroyed statues in parks and also robbed museums, saying statues and imagery were against Islam,” said the father of the wanted activist.

“The bride changed. Instead of the white dress it was forced to wear black.”

#ASL

Revealed: How immigrants are using Skype weddings to gain U.S. citizenship - by saying ’I do’ from thousands of miles away | Mail Online
▻http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2289177/Revealed-How-immigrants-using-Skype-weddings-gain-U-S-citizenship--sayi

Online global unions via webcam are the first step to attaining a visa or citizenship for a non-American spouse
Many fear that such proxy weddings will help facilitate marriage fraud, as well as see an increase in the number of sex trafficking victims

#skype #migration

Teenagers say goodbye to #facebook and hello to messenger apps | Technology | The Observer
▻http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/10/teenagers-messenger-apps-facebook-exodus

Haha ! M’enfin, si c’est pour aller chez Skype…(Permalink)

Multi-party #video chat in a web page... Welcome to the era when a thrown-together demo can put #Skype out of business ! ▻https://opentokrtc.com #webRTC

Agentura.ru - FSB: Not backing down over skype
▻http://agentura.ru/english/equipment/skype

FSB: Not backing down over skype
Andrei Soldatov

The Deputy Head of the FSB Scientific and Technical Service, Alexander Andreechkin’s statement on the danger posed by the use of encryption systems in gmail, hotmail and Skype prompted a flood of comments from high placed officials. First came an anonymous comment from President Medvedev’s administration, making it clear his own position superseded Andreechkin’s statement. Then came the Prime Minister’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, backing the FSB official and supporting the FSB initiative. Then came a statement from the FSB’s own Public Communication Center declaring that the agency had been misunderstood and that no one intended to ban anything.

For some reason, this final statement led many people to decide that the issue had been resolved: an FSB official simply made a somewhat extreme statement, the President’s Administration had taken them down a peg or two, the FSB then distanced itself from the claim. The only area still causing confusion being Peskov’s statement, which provided new grounds for speculation about friction in the tandem.

In reality, no one took anyone down a peg or two and the FSB in no way changed the position which it formulated back in the 1990’s.

Au rayon ma #startup deviendra grande, l’étrange histoire de Skype.

“How can they be so good?”: The strange story of #Skype | Ars Technica via @opironet
▻http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/09/skypes-secrets

On August 29, 2003, Skype went live for the first time. By 2012, according to Telegeography, Skype accounted for a whopping 167 billion minutes of cross-border voice and video calling in a year—which itself was a stunning 44 percent growth over 2011. That increase in minutes was “more than twice that achieved by all international carriers in the world, combined.” That is to say, Skype today poses a serious threat to the largest telcos on the planet. It also made Jaan Tallinn and other early Skypers rich.

#internet_traffic #tech_companies

How Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages | World news | The Guardian
►http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data

Microsoft’s latest marketing campaign, launched in April, emphasizes its commitment to privacy with the slogan: “Your privacy is our priority.”

Similarly, Skype’s privacy policy states: “Skype is committed to respecting your privacy and the confidentiality of your personal data, traffic data and communications content.”

But internal NSA newsletters, marked top secret, suggest the co-operation between the intelligence community and the companies is deep and ongoing.

Revealed: how Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages | World news | guardian.co.uk
►http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data

Microsoft’s latest marketing campaign, launched in April, emphasizes its commitment to privacy with the slogan: “Your privacy is our priority.”

Similarly, Skype’s privacy policy states: “Skype is committed to respecting your privacy and the confidentiality of your personal data, traffic data and communications content.”

#microsoft #bonimenteurs_éhontés

Utiliser Google search sans les inconvénients de PRISM

►https://www.startpage.com/eng/prism-program-exposed.html

Programs like PRISM undermine our Privacy, disrupt faith in governments, and are a danger to the free Internet.

StartPage and its sister search engine Ixquick have in their 14-year history never provided a single byte of user data to the US government, or any other government or agency. Not under PRISM, nor under any other program in the US, nor under any program anywhere in the world. We are not like Yahoo, Facebook, Google, Apple, Skype, or the other US companies who got caught up in the web of PRISM surveillance.

Here’s how we are different:

StartPage does not store any user data. We make this perfectly clear to everyone, including any governmental agencies. We do not record the IP addresses of our users and we don’t use tracking cookies, so there is literally no data about you on our servers to access. Since we don’t even know who our customers are, we can’t share anything with Big Brother. In fact, we’ve never gotten even a single request from a governmental authority to supply user data in the fourteen years we’ve been in business.

StartPage uses encryption (HTTPS) by default. Encryption prevents snooping. Your searches are encrypted, so others can’t “tap” the Internet connection to snoop what you’re searching for. This combination of not storing data together with using strong encryption for the connections is key in protecting your Privacy.

Our company is based in The Netherlands, Europe. US jurisdiction does not apply to us, at least not directly. Any request or demand from ANY government (including the US) to deliver user data, will be thoroughly checked by our lawyers, and we will not comply unless the law which actually applies to us would undeniably require it from us. And even in that hypothetical situation, we refer to our first point; we don’t even have any user data to give. We will never cooperate with voluntary spying programs like PRISM.

StartPage cannot be forced to start spying. Given the strong protection of the Right to Privacy in Europe , European governments cannot just start forcing service providers like us to implement a blanket spying program on their users. And if that ever changed, we would fight this to the end.

Bon, c’est leur page de publicité, mais je fais confiance à nos voisins à cause de leur merveilleux #fromage.

#surveillance

#NSA massively harvests data from nine #USA #Internet services companies under the highly classified #surveillance program, code-named PRISM, whose existence has been revealed in a leaked presentation: ▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html

#Microsoft #Yahoo #Google #Facebook #PalTalk #AOL #Skype #YouTube #Apple #PalTalk #Dropbox

Les menaces qui avaient été proférées il y a deux mois par les autorités saoudiennes contre Viber/Skype/ Whatsapp (voir les posts de Gonzo/miens) sont en passe d’être mises à exécution.

Saudi Regulator Blocks Viber Messaging Service, Threatens Others - Businessweek
▻http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-06-05/saudi-regulator-blocks-viber-messaging-service-threatens-others

Saudi Arabia, the Arab world’s biggest economy, blocked the Viber messaging application service, the kingdom’s communication authority said.

Viber doesn’t meet the regulatory requirements and laws in the kingdom, the Saudi Communications and Information Technology Commission said today in statement on its website. The commission will “take appropriate action against any other applications or services that fail to comply with regulatory requirements,” it said in the statement.

Ekiga 4.0 offers a fresh, open source Skype alternative | PCWorld
▻http://www.pcworld.com/article/2018815/ekiga-4-0-offers-a-fresh-open-source-skype-alternative.html

Arriving some three years after the previous release, Ekiga 4.0—also known as “The Victory Release”—is now available, offering a fresh new Skype alternative for users of Linux and Windows alike.

sip:suske_arobase_ekiga.net :-)

Skype for Linux 4.2
▻http://blogs.skype.com/2013/05/20/skype-for-linux-4-2

Spring is a time for growth, renewal and change. In the spirit of the season, we’ve released the brand new Skype for Linux 4.2 update.
We rolled up our sleeves and reconsidered the heart of the Skype for Linux client. We’re very excited about the results and think that you will be too.
Click here to get started with Skype for Linux 4.2 …

Source: Skype Blogs

#garage_&_updates #call #linux #password #reliability #skype #voice_messaging

Skype with care – Microsoft is reading everything you write - The H Security : News and Features
►http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Skype-with-care-Microsoft-is-reading-everything-you-write-1862870.html

toujours plus de big brother : les communications Skype espionnées par Microsoft sous prétexte de chasse au spam/phishing... Avec (bien entendu !) obligation d’accès aux logs pour les services gouvernementaux américains

#big-brother #spam #vie_privée #microsoft #skype #intrusion

The WebRTC threat to #Skype is not a killer startup but thousand cuts as #WebRTC integrates trivially in applications everywhere.

You were using #Skype instead of #SIP because you found it easier ? Meet the Skype killer - now quick and easy to integrate in any #Web environment. ▻http://danielpocock.com/get-webrtc-going-fast #telephony #RTC #WebRTC #VOIP

Rien ne va plus en Arabie où l’application des dispositions pour déporter les étrangers en situation irrégulière ont fait paniquer les conducteurs de camion-citernes qui, en infraction à la loi sur le travail, se sont arrêtés de travailler...
Dans les files d’attente, les rumeurs, parmi les citoyens privés d’eau depuis parfois 2 semaines, vont bon train contre les officiels accusés de se servir d’eau en priorité..

▻http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentid=20130405159988

الداخلية السعودية : استخدام شبكات التواصل الاجتماعي يخضع لنظام مكافحة جرائم المعلومات
▻http://www.alquds.co.uk/index.asp?fname=latest/data/2013-03-29-11-50-44.htm

الداخلية السعودية: استخدام شبكات التواصل الاجتماعي يخضع لنظام مكافحة جرائم المعلومات

Dans la lignée des précédentes menaces, le ministère de l’Intérieur d’Arabie saoudite rappelle que « l’utilisation des réseaux sociaux est soumise au code de la répression des délits d’information ».

#tic_arabe

Le FBI fait de la surveillance en continu de GMail et des différentes offres de Cloud grand public sa priorité stratégique pour 2013 :

“a 1994 surveillance law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act only allows the government to force Internet providers and phone companies to install surveillance equipment within their networks. But it doesn’t cover email, cloud services, or online chat providers like Skype. Weissmann said that the FBI wants the power to mandate real-time surveillance of everything from Dropbox and online games (“the chat feature in Scrabble”) to Gmail and Google Voice. “Those communications are being used for criminal conversations,” he said.”

►http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/03/26/andrew_weissmann_fbi_wants_real_time_gmail_dropbox_spying_power.html

Le FBI fait de la surveillance en continu de GMail et des différentes offres de Cloud grand public sa priorité stratégique pour 2013 :

“a 1994 surveillance law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act only allows the government to force Internet providers and phone companies to install surveillance equipment within their networks. But it doesn’t cover email, cloud services, or online chat providers like Skype. Weissmann said that the FBI wants the power to mandate real-time surveillance of everything from Dropbox and online games (“the chat feature in Scrabble”) to Gmail and Google Voice. “Those communications are being used for criminal conversations,” he said.”

►http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/03/26/andrew_weissmann_fbi_wants_real_time_gmail_dropbox_spying_power.html

Après avoir demandé aux utilisateurs des réseaux sociaux de la modération, le Royaume sollicite les compagnies de télécommunication pour mettre un peu d’ordre. Casse tête de la libre expression sur le net

Saudi Arabia’s telecommunications regulator has threatened to block messaging applications, such as Skype, WhatsApp and Viber if telecommunication companies fail to monitor the applications.
The Saudi Telecommunications and Information Technology Commission urged telecom companies to examine possible ways for security oversight with companies who own those ‘apps.’
The commission gave the telecom companies until the end of this week to respond. In case they say it is impossible to monitor the applications, the commission said it will consider procedures to block them altogether in the kingdom.

Al Arabiya
▻http://english.alarabiya.net/en/2013/03/25/-Saudi-Arabia-threatens-to-block-Skype-WhatsApp-Viber.html